Identifying household cooling savings potential in the hot summer and cold winter climate zone in China: A stochastic demand frontier approach

Highlights: • This paper provides a data-driven research paradigm for policy making. • A stochastic frontier approach is used to study the cooling savings potential. • There is a 35 % cooling savings potential via efficiency measures in the HSCW zone. • The key factors influencing the household cooling savings potential are identified. Cooling demand increases more than ten times over the past two decades in China. Especially, cooling in the Hot Summer and Cold Winter (HSCW) climate zone increases rapidly and becomes the fastest growing part in urban residential energy consumption. It will bring huge challenges to carbon emission cap control if effective and reasonable energy-saving and emission reduction measures are not taken. This study uses a data-driven method to identify cooling savings potential at household level using survey data from 1068 households in 2018 in Chongqing, China. A stochastic frontier analysis model is applied to decompose the actual cooling electricity consumption into minimum consumption based on fixed household characteristics and estimate the over-consumption (i.e. the amount of cooling consumption that could be saved). The results show that households have an average cooling efficiency of 65 %, which indicates that each household in the HSCW area has the potential to reduce its cooling electricity consumption by 35% while still maintaining the same level of cooling services currently produced. The study shows that the cooling savings potential is strongly influenced by level of household income, the level of building energy efficiency standards, cooling behavior characteristics and households' energy-saving consciousness. Policy implications are derived.